To enjoy the greatest benefits from your company's online presence, it's important to devote time and energy to web site management and marketing.
About Web Site Management and Marketing
Having an Internet presence is an important part of virtually every company's marketing plan. However, simply having a website isn't sufficient to harness the power of the Internet to promote your business. For a site to have a positive impact on your business, you'll need to manage and market it on an ongoing basis. This involves maintaining the site, keeping it updated, and taking steps to increase traffic.
Managing Your Website
Reliable Hosting
Select a reliable hosting company for your company's website. Choose a company with an excellent up time rating. After all, whenever your website is down, it won't serve the purpose of marketing your business. It's also important to choose a company with accessible customer service. Look for one that offers several means of contacting technical support, including a web contact form, an e-ticket system, and a telephone number. Avoid using a free hosting company to host your commercial website. Relying on a free hosting service does not send the right message about your company. Additionally, there are problems inherent with this hosting option. The free hosting providers tend to be slower and less reliable than paid hosting providers, and the terms of use often require access to customer information and placement of pop up advertising.
Usability
Verifying that your web site is easy to navigate is an important part of web site management and marketing. It's essential that people who are not familiar with your business find it easy to get the information they need when looking at your web site. When creating and updating your web site, whether you do it yourself or use a professional web developer, you'll need to keep the user experience in mind.
Functionality
It's essential to make sure that your web site is fully functional at all times. When customers use the search box on your site, for example, they'll assume you don't have what they need if the results don't reveal what they are looking for. They aren't likely to call your business to make sure that you don't have what they are looking for. Instead, they're going to assume you don't because they couldn't find what they needed online. Check the links and features on your site on a regular basis to make sure they are working.
Accurate Content
Customers rely heavily on the information published on web sites, so it's important the information on your website is accurate and up to date. Make time on your schedule to update your web site each week. If something changes in between scheduled updates, take care of correcting the published information immediately.
Marketing Your Website
Keyword Optimization
It's important to make sure that it's easy for prospective customers to find your company's online presence. One way of doing this is to include the correct keywords and phrases in your site's meta tags and content. Select words and phrases that people who are looking for what you have to offer are likely to type into search engines and incorporate them into your web site using the principles of effective search engine optimization.
Link Building
Building links to your web site from other quality sites is another way to help your site show up better in search engine results when people are looking for what you have to offer. If many quality sites include links to your web site, it's likely to show up higher in relevant search engine rankings. There are many things you can do to increase links to your web site, including article marketing, viral marketing, and requesting or purchasing links on selected sites.
Pay Per Click Advertising
In addition to trying to attract visitors through natural search engine results, you may also want to utilize pay per click advertising to increase traffic to your site. The major search engines offer sponsored link advertising opportunities. Instead of paying to place an ad for your web site in a specific location, you will agree to pay a set amount every time someone who has conducted a pre-determined Internet search clicks through an advertisement to your web site. The cost will vary based on the search terms you desire. This can be an effective way to get qualified visitors to come to your site.
Managing and Marketing Your Site
These are just a few of the most basic aspects of effective web site management and marketing. Once you make sure the basics are in place, you'll likely start to see positive results from your efforts. Then, you can move on to incorporating even more strategies for effective web site promotion into your ongoing Internet marketing efforts.
